SharePoint 2010 : Operations Management with the SharePoint Central Administration Tool (part 3) - Administering Monitoring Tasks in SPCA

Administering Monitoring Tasks in SPCA

The Monitoring page in SPCA, as shown in Figure 12, deals with all built-in monitoring tools and concepts in SharePoint 2010.

Figure 12. Exploring the monitoring options in SPCA.

The first category on the page deals specifically with the Health Analyzer, which determines the overall health of the SharePoint farm. This section includes the following links:

• Review problems and solutions— Takes the administrator directly to a list of configuration issues that exist in the farm based on the rules that are set up by the Health Analyzer.

• Review rule definitions— The rules that are run by the Health Analyzer can be modified in this area, as shown in Figure 13.

  Figure 13. Modifying Health Analyzer rules.

  

Timer Jobs

Within the second category on the System Settings page are the tasks related to Timer Jobs. Timer Jobs, as shown in Figure 6.14, are extremely important services that run on a regularly scheduled basis to perform specific tasks, such as maintenance, analysis, synchronization, and other farm-critical tasks that must be performed on a regular basis. The links available within this field include the following:

• Review job definitions— This area of SPCA, as shown in Figure 14, enables the current timer job settings to be viewed and their schedules to be modified, if necessary.

• Check job status— The job status area of SPCA is where administrators should go to check on the status of current timer jobs and see when the next time they are scheduled to run.

Figure 14. Exploring Timer Jobs.

Reporting

Within the third category on the Monitoring page, labeled Reporting, are links to all those administrative areas directly related to reporting, including diagnostic logs, usage reports, and health reports. The following key links are included in this area:

• View administrative reports— This area focuses on those reports that are related to administrative tasks. For example, search reports, such as the one shown in Figure 15, can be accessed from within this area.

  Figure 15. Accessing search reports.

  

• Configure diagnostic logging— Diagnostic logs are not turned on by default in SharePoint 2010, but can be enabled from within this area of SPCA. Logs can be generated for each category of service, as shown in Figure 16. In addition, settings related to event log flood protection and trace logs can be modified in this area. It is highly recommended to place all logs on a separate volume from the drive where SharePoint binaries and the OS are installed to avoid running out of disk space.

  Figure 16. Configuring diagnostic logging.

  

• Review information management policy usage reports— These types of reports are used for information management policy reports, which are related to Information Rights Management and Data Leak Prevention (DLP).
  

• View health reports— Health reports, such as the one shown in Figure 17, provide information such as what pages are the slowest, and who are the top active users in a site.

  Figure 17. Viewing health reports.

  

• Configure usage and health data collection— This area is critical because it allows for the configuration of the usage data logs, which can determine what areas of SharePoint are being used. It also enables the location of the usage logs to be set. As with all logs in SharePoint, it is highly recommended to store these on a separate data partition than SharePoint and the OS are installed on.

• View web analytics reports— Web analytics reports, such as the one shown in Figure 18, can determine top visitors to pages, number of page views, and other useful metrics in the SharePoint environment.

  Figure 18. Viewing web analytics reports.